How Marketo (now Adobe) built a brand ($4.75B) and not a start-up

Rachel Kavanagh
6 min readDec 3, 2018

It’s a few weeks now since the news broke about the Adobe acquisition of Marketo and it’s an interesting story, especially for anyone starting a business. The company was sold for $4.75 billion dollars by private equity firm Vista Equity. Despite the elusive nature of unicorns and start-up happy endings it was not one bit surprising to anyone who witnessed the early journey. Marketo was taken private in 2015 at $1.8 billion and now joins the Adobe empire, post injection of substantial share premium and product infrastructure.

I joined Marketo in 2012 and even when interviewing I just knew something was going on. The European team was small and based in Dublin, extremely calm and experienced, and contained invaluable Salesforce (.com) founder DNA.

Soon after, I first heard the phrase Marketo Secret Sauce which is what our customers expected, on top of launching their platform. As time went on I noticed the sauce was mentioned everywhere in the company and that’s what comes to mind with the latest news. We were in a real start-up mode back then, on the verge of IPO and everyone was pretty much focused on their next deliverable. It was chaotic and high adrenaline. The storm before the calm.

When I look back on that time, through the iconic purple haze, I can see clearer now why the sauce was so addictive.

  1. Marketo is to Marketing what Salesforce is to Sales”. That was how I described the product when nobody knew it’s name. It’s a nice tag line if you can get it and this is what Marketo really was. The product was a new paradigm to enable non-technical marketers. It was a port in the storm with a familiar feel in an environment where many were drowning in new buzzwords and technologies.
  2. Marketo used Marketo to achieve phenomenal growth. The product continued to grow more leads, more clients, more revenue and to grow the company right to acquisition. It was a live Sales demo from heaven especially when it was new. From live tracking and lead scoring to newly invented metrics in the app, the roadshow sold its own compelling story and hooked prospects and investors alike. The story of Marketo was legendary and highly visible. People like Jon Miller and Sanjay Dholakia earned the right to be prominent thought leaders and also played a personal role in the content strategy.

3. Marketo started the conversation with relevant content and finished with a relevant product. Marketo spoke the language of its users and brought technology to the people not the other way around. When most of the martech community was talking about data and technical solutions Marketo made automation accessible to the marketer. Marketers had a tool they could use without the techies and marketing content that spoke to their needs. The content strategy educated them on what they currently didn’t have, piece by piece, nurturing the appetite of the whole marketing team. In Europe over 80% of sales started with a download.

4. Marketo was limitless. I remember the announcement by Phil Fernandez (CEO) that the company had decided to make Marketo like the iPhone. Instead of building all the functionality within the same application (social media was being considered at the time) Marketo started Launchpoint and provided easy integration. The apps did what they do best so Marketo didn’t have to (eg: Hootesuite). Additionally as the the product is a query language on a database so there are unlimited possibilities in terms of what can be automated. There was prestige associated with doing clever things. It was addictive and created product stickiness once you started to learn. Sometimes frustrating as you couldn’t do what you wanted to but often in a future release you could.

5. Marketo integrated with a market leader. The company had invested in a high quality integration and Salesforce customers were happy to share their visual working space with additional real time data. It was quick to implement and robust integration in technical terms. It allowed Sales and Marketing to pratically share a process maybe for the first time ever. Later Salesforce and Marketo were to become competitors.

6. Marketo created community in three main ways. (i) The online Marketo Community was a place for customers and partners to learn and also showcase their knowledge; it was highly interactive and used gamification. It was a place where people were recognised for being clever and being a Marketo expert. The support team were highly visible in the community building trust. Customers could vote for future features and many of them, especially in the early days, became part of the product. (ii) Marketo certified customers and partners giving them status and creating further product prestige. The exams were difficult enough to require some preparation and it was an extra qualification for your marketing CV. (iii) The Summit was flashy and punched far above it’s weight. Even in the early days Will Smith, Beth Comstock, Ariana Huffington, Hillary Clinton (before the election!) and John Legend all shared the stage with Marketo leadership. It added to the hype that working with a high growth company presents. The customer stories were like lego puzzles, users keen to share their solutions and get exposure with their peers. Cheryl Chavez, the head of product, showered “Customer Love” and inclusively announced the latest features, many voted in through the online community.

7. Marketo loved Marketo. I was once told by a client that Marketo was a cult. The consultants, the support team, the sales team and management, everyone was so passionate. What was in that secret sauce? It was far from a perfect company with challenges like the rest. We were working really hard. Many of us had to travel all over the world and give a lot of our personal time to do that. For some it was the equity but for most I don’t think so. In the early days we were doing something new. Something that changed (business) lives. We were part of a very focused group and we trusted the leadership. We had colleagues we could rely on. And maybe it was as simple as we had something that was rewarding to sell.

As I finish up this post I realise that sauce is interchangeable with brand which is another way of saying trust. The sauce had personality. It was likeable to innovative marketers and felt safe to those afraid of tech. It was clever. It had real values. It was successful. It provided professional advancement possibilities to its certified customers in unsure times. And the product automated revenue and saved a lot of time.

In a time when subscription products would disappear in an instant, customers trusted the brand. Phil Fernandez addressed business updates to his Purple People due to the colour of the branding. And that’s what we were. For better or worse we were passionate about our work and it transferred to the customers in an unprecedented fashion.

So I’m happy for Adobe and I’m happy for the brand. It’s now worth $4.75 billion which says a hell of a lot. I’m happy for the marketers who know that Marketo is staying around. I’m happy for the founders that the legacy continues on. And although it’s not guaranteed once a product changes hands, I’m optimistic that Marketo will continue to bleed purple.

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